By Walt Hickey

Fakes

Italy’s Guardia di Finanza has arrested nine Italian nationals in possession of a cache of 12,000 counterfeit video game consoles loaded with a grand total of 47 million pirated video games with an estimated street value of €47.5 million ($52.8 million). The details are still emerging, but they look a whole lot like fake Nintendo consoles and various handheld devices that the Italian cops said came from China by way of Italian companies in a trafficking ring. Because the Italians pursuing Nintendo justice are in on the joke, the investigation was called “Coin-Up 80.” Fun fact, in the 1980s and ’90s video games weren’t protected like other forms of entertainment in Italy, which gave the country a reputation for its fairly out-in-the-open piracy scene.

Nicole Carpenter, Polygon

Scranton

The Scranton Army Ammunition Plant is cranking out 155-millimeter howitzer rounds bound for Ukraine and Taiwan. Prior to the invasion, the U.S. Army was making 14,000 artillery shells per month, which rose to 24,000 as of six months ago and today is up to 36,000 per month. Russia is producing an estimated 250,000 artillery shells per month, which is around three times the goal of the U.S. military, and Ukraine right now is receiving about 90,000 shells per month. All told, it takes about 30 to 40 shells to take out a single Russian target.

Mansee Khurana, NPR

Trusts

States own lots and lots of land, including land within Indigenous reservations, which gives state governments authority over land that is otherwise controlled by Native American tribes. That means that states can give the go-ahead to mining, logging and drilling on lands that are ostensibly controlled by tribes. A new analysis of publicly available data found that 2 million surface and subsurface acres of land on 79 reservations across 15 states were impacted by state trust land laws and policies. In four states, five tribal nations actually have to pay the state to lease the land within their own reservation borders, 57,700 acres in the aggregate.

Anna Smith and Maria Parazo Rose, Grist and High Country News

Candy Man

It’s been a bit of a rough time for the $49 billion confectionary industry given the high price of sugar, which reached 45.75 cents per pounds as of last November on the New York futures market. Today, prices are down to 36 cents per pound, and could drop another 10 percent. That’s driven by a pretty great crop this year in cane and sugar beets: The first beets of the season are being harvested right about now, and the sugar content of the pre-pile harvest is coming in at 16 percent, which is two points higher than normal. The U.S. is projected to produce 9.5 million short tons of sugar in the 2024-25 year, with production from beets projected to rise 2.9 percent and production from cane up 1.4 percent.

Ilena Peng, Bloomberg

Battery

Your typical music festival is an event where diesel fuel is converted into sound by way of several talented intermediaries called “musicians.” Any event that involves dragging people to a vast open space and then entertaining them for hours or days has generally required dozens of diesel generators operating behind the scenes, and lately organizers have been switching over to batteries and having a pretty solid time doing so. Generators are loud, smelly, and can rack up carbon emissions that tick off the talent. When Lollapalooza 2024’s main stage was powered exclusively by batteries, the festival logged a 67 percent decline in fuel use, averting a need for 3,000 gallons of diesel.

Katie Bain, Billboard

Rings

A new hypothesis published in Earth and Planetary Sciences puts forward the idea that 466 million years ago, Earth may have had a ring system. Recent rings aren’t inherently preposterous — Saturn’s rings might be as young as 100 million years old — and the evidence presented is that after reconstructing what Earth’s continents looked like at the time, the positions of all 21 major asteroid impact craters are within 30 degrees of the equator. That’s weird, given that asteroids otherwise strike Earth at random locations and thus are pretty evenly distributed. Such a concentration of impacts on the land that was then at the equator is actually evidence that something hit us, a ring was formed, and then it slowly crashed to Earth over the next couple years.

Silvia Dropulich, Monash University

Coronal Mass Ejection

A coronal mass ejection is when the sun spews out a massive amount of plasma and magnetic fields, which send a whole lot of charged particles outward at places like us. A recent big one was in 1859, when the first such event was observed, which meant for amazing auroras visible as far south as Cuba but also massive malfunctions of the telegraph wires that constituted the most advanced electronic infrastructure of the time. Obviously, we’ve got a little more going on these days, so a CME at the severity of the 1859 Carrington Event — estimated as a 0.02 percent to 1.6 percent probability on 10-year scale — could be pretty bad.

John Konrad, gCaptain

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